One of the most frustrating parts of eating homemade foods is trying to figure out how many calories are in those casseroles, desserts, breads, etc….

Now you may think I’m crazy, but I keep a daily journal of everything I eat and drink and how many calories each item contains. Hey, it’s working for me.

Well, I recently ran across an awesome website that allows you to input all the ingredients of your recipe, along with the number of servings, and then it calculates the calories per serving. Isn’t that cool?

The name of the website is MyFitnessPal, and it’s totally free! As a matter of fact, you don’t even have to register in order to calculate recipe calories.

However, if you want to save your recipes, you do have to register, and that’s really easy to do also. I already have about four pages worth of saved recipes on the site.

I know most of you probably don’t keep up with all your calories like I do. Nevertheless, I thought you might like to know that if you are ever curious about the calories in that piece of chocolate cake or that super cheesy casserole, you can easily find out.

The above link is to the website homepage, but you can click here to get a direct link to the recipe calculator.

Of course, the website offers many other tools as well, including an online food journal and exercise diary. I personally only use the site for the recipe calculator and looking up various food items.

I find that keeping my information in a notebook with pencil and paper works best for me. It’s also a lot more portable than my laptop.

This is the form I created for myself to track my daily foods, exercise and even my water intake.

As you can see, I also added a to do list at the top and my menu plan for the day. I keep it all in a binder in my kitchen drawer, so it’s very easy to grab when I need it.

Here is the link to a printable copy of the form, if you would like to try it out for yourself.

Again, this may not be something useful for you, but if you know someone who is trying to monitor their calories, I’m sure they would find MyFitnessPal to be a very useful tool.

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15 Comments

Thank you so much for this! I am starting to track my diet again and I am “estimating” way too often. I like to track with pencil and paper too- I think it’s easier. I’ll try your print out- thanks so much! Kristin´s last blog ..in the kitchen

You’re welcome! When I started using this handy tool, I realized how bad I was at estimating
It’s also amazing how many calories you can get throughout the day on all the little things you don’t think about, or forget about. Hope the printout works for you!

I would like to make home-made granola..so, I’m dealing in large quantities, i.e., “a large box of Old
Fashioned Oatmeal”.. the above calorie counter for recipes doesn’t deal in such large quantities..Do you
know of any other site (besides WWatchers) that can
help me?

It allows you to copy and paste the ingredients from a recipe right onto the site, and then analyzes the ingredients to give you a calorie amount per serving specified. You will have to know the number of ounces in the box, however, for it to calculate correctly.

When you cook food, it increases the calories, so simply dividing out the raw ingredients isn’t enough. I’m trying to find a website which calculates the calories of cooked food based on raw ingredients, with no luck.

Um.. I’m sorry, but no, just simply cooking food does not add calories to it, it is what you cook food IN that adds calories, but the process it’s self does not. I’m a personal trainer and I also use both sites for myself and my clients. They are wonderful resources.

Hi. Like you, I’m calorie counting, mainly due to the fact that I packed in the cigarettes about 12 months ago and I’ve noticed a gain in weight. I’m doing well, but my question is, I make all my cakes/biscuits/deserts from scratch. How can I work out how many calories in my baking? Thanks x

Thank you. I just started using My Fitness Pal about a week ago. I didn’t realize it calculated your recipes. I am loving it! It calculates everything for you. The more you use it, the easier it gets. I have lost 5 lbs. in one week. I use the digital format, because I can do it online or use it in my phone app (free).

What I am finding on all of these free calorie counters online is that none are easy to add your own recipes, except WW, which there is a fee. All of the others, you start to add the ingredient and you will need to figure it up yourself, for instance one recipe I was putting in was like 2000 tsps. of sugar? They need a choice for cups, ounces, etc. Most of them don’t have this accept WW, and so this is why I must pay. Its too difficult. I have a lot of recipes in WW and it was easy to plug them in, but they are missing alot of foods in their database that fat secret and others have, so it depends on what you are looking for the most.

What a good well-written post this is. I love your form. I found your blog when looking for a calorie counter for home made food. I write a cooking blog called The Rube Cook. I see you refer to the one on My Fitness Pal. I tried it and it seemed to have trouble adding ingredients like egg, blueberries and sugar. It did okay on the processed foods. Any tips? I think I’m going old on this, I’m a rarity–a writer who can do math.
Love the blog!